Here’s What Journalists Really Want from Hillary Clinton

Let me share the No. 1 thing you need to know about journalists: they crave information.

It seems obvious, but it’s also easy to forget. When you’re in the media glare, it’s easy to think, “What is wrong with these people? How do they live with themselves?”

What’s wrong with them is that they know that they’re useless unless they can provide some new information—the bigger the better, but any little scrap will do.

According to a new article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker,Hillary Clinton is the latest public figure wrestling with this conundrum: how do you give the press what they want without (a) being driven crazy or (b) being burned by some jerk reporter?

The question is being framed in terms of access, since you can’t get your hands on original information without talking to the people who possess it. Some complain that Clinton has been too “remote.” Those on her team find that absurd. Auletta quotes former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines scoffing at the idea that more access would bring more favorable coverage: “Why, because she only spent ninety seconds with them when she brought them bagels to the back of the bus? And if she spent nine minutes the coverage would have been fair? That’s apparently the takeaway: because she didn’t spend enough time with them and their bagels, they couldn’t be fair.’”

As a journalist of sorts, I can’t help but point out two things: (a) nine minutes isn’t very much time, and (b) it’s not about the bagels! These journalists crave scoops, not carbs—although scoops delivered over carbs is best of all.

Why not spend 30 minutes back there every so often, talking about whatever you are able to talk about? If you can’t give the reporters assigned to cover your campaign or office any new information, you can at least give them some perspective on where you’re coming from—or, at the very least, some evidence that you’re not the monster your enemies say you are. (It doesn’t matter who you are; in politics, your enemies are always painting you as a monster.) Moreover, you’d probably be surprised how much of what sounds uninteresting to you is actually news to journalists.

Team Obama will tell you that he’s tried this and it doesn’t work. In D.C. recently, I happened to overhear a White House press rep complaining to a prominent media reporter about another journalist’s decision to leak word that Obama had “whined to reporters about their coverage” during a flight on Air Force One. The press rep sounded anguished as he explained that breaches of that kind meant only one thing: less access for the reporters.

But off-the-record sessions are worse than useless for reporters: they’re confusing and counterproductive, since they yield information that would be news but can’t be used unless—what, exactly?

Meanwhile, reporters aren’t the only ones disappointing Obama with their inability to keep his secrets. In Double Down, their account of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write about Obama’s fury after his own staff leaked the details of a private meeting where he talked extensively about his wish list of progressive policy objectives.

Obama should stop telling groups of people things he doesn’t want made public and instead learn how to have a casual conversation that stays within the boundaries of what he can bear to read about in the newspaper. And so should Hillary.

The old days when public figures could maintain sterling reputations by limiting public appearances to the occasional back-handed wave from the palace balcony are over. The trick now is to seem like a regular, down-to-earth person—even as you pull off the superhuman feat of building a brand, staying on-message, and avoiding committing any of a million possible micro-offenses.

It’s tricky as hell, but nobody said being president would be easy. And Obama and Clinton can console themselves with the fact that the journalists don’t have it so easy, either. All they have to do is consistently file compelling, “original” articles built on nuggets of information shared with the entire White House pool while simultaneously establishing trust with their audience, which thinks (knows?) that the government is lying about everything, and the government itself, which control their access to the information they need to do their jobs.

Given those complexities, 90 seconds and a bagel is the least you can give them.